Hasta La Gadget!

If you buy this spectacular set of colored pencils, you won’t actually need to draw anything. Just hang them on the wall for an instant work of art.

In all, there are 500 chromatic crayons, arrayed in five cases. You can buy the cases (without pencils) all at once for $260, or get them the old fashioned way — one a month for $52 a pop. For the pencils themselves, you need another subscription, and it’ll cost you an extra $33 per month, for 20 long, long months.

We see a problem here. If you are the kind of person who would display a spectrum of color like this, in anally-retentive chromatic order, it’s likely that you would go crazy looking at the empty cases for almost two years, as they laugh at you and taunt you with their frustrating incompleteness.

Instead it might be better to buy them for somebody you kind of don’t like, and watch them slowly unwind as the torture keeps coming, one dripping pencil-package at a time. Meanwhile, you can comfort yourself over on the product page by reading the names of the individual colors. Our favorites? I picked the very English “Tea with Milk”, Priya likes the “Frog Pond” for reasons unknown, and Dylan, being a true San Franciscan, went with “Drizzly Afternoon”. And Brian X Chen, dunker of iPhones and buyer of phallic motorcycles? He chose “Tragedy”.

Product page [500 Pencils]

This bag is either an itinerant chef’s dream, or simply the well thought out kit of a serial-killer.

Designed by three Carnegie Mellon students, the bag lets a cook carry everything he needs with him. Think of it as an OCD picnic basket. Much like a camera-bag, the Chef’s Bag has a place for everything: sleeves for knives, peelers, graters, books and of course Band-Aids. Unlike a camera bag, the Chef’s Bag is designed not only to protect the gear inside, but also to protect the carrier from the contents.

Why would you take so much with you? Pro chefs can be very precious about their kit. Watch a bartender trying to borrow a simple, cheap fruit-knife from the kitchen and you’ll see what I mean. Also, the tools become familiar. When I moved from England to Spain, I gave away most of my possessions. The bulk of gear that I shipped was kitchen equipment — after spending years to find the right peeler, knife or pan, you don’t want to use somebody else’s.

The bag is just a one-off student project right now, but we’d like to see it come to market. At the very least, it’s better than the awful chef’s briefcase, a plastic monstrosity full of knives that seems to be standard issue at catering college.

Project page [Core77 boards via Core77]

Roomba not sucking the way it used to? Samsung sure hopes not, as it has just recently pushed out a robotic vacuum cleaner of its very own. Quietly showcased during IFA earlier this month, the Furot II packs an oh-so-familiar design and sports an integrated camera and mapping system that enables it to find its way, remember its course and clean your floors with practically no human assistance. There’s also an array of sensors that keep it from slamming into this and that, and the rechargeable battery keeps it humming for around 1.5 hours before petering out and making a beeline for its charging station. We get the impression that it’ll be available in both black and refulgent red, though no price and release date is currently available.

[Via Coolest-Gadgets]

Filed under: Household, Robots

Samsung’s Furot II robovac wants a piece of your Roomba originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Over in England, design students Yusuf Muhammed and Paul Thomas have won a design award for their fire-extinguishing faucet. The Automist, which has won the UK James Dyson Award, is a simple retro-fitted mixer-tap with one key additon: In line with the cold water pipe is a cylinder which shares the water supply and can pump it out of holes in the base of the faucet. This is done at pressure high enough to fill the room with mist.

The Automist is triggered by a ceiling mounted smoke detector which beams its warning down to the sink, whereupon the fire-killing fog is triggered. The mist does double-duty, not only dousing flames but cooling the room from a face-melting 250ºC down to a hot but safe 50ºC (122ºF).

The cleverest part is that the Automist can hook up to existing kitchen sinks, and that the kitchen is also the most likely place for a fire to start. Of course, we’re sure the old cigarette-lighter-under-sprinkler trick will also work, for some hilarious chef-baiting shenanigans.

UK James Dyson Award Winner Announced [Core77]

Gabriele Meldaikyte’s range of kitchen kit allows cooks to prepare food single-handed. And we mean that literally.

One-Hand Kitchen Equipment is a counter-top convenience that lets anybody with the use of only one hand to chop, slice, open and grate most groceries and foodstuffs. The heart of the system is a secured baseboard with various “walls” which hold things in place.

For instance, the top chopping board has a rear lip, around two-inches high with a curved section. This can be used in conjunction with the front lip to secure a grater, a circular food holder or a spiked board. When slid back, it makes a “vise” which can clamp bread, jars and other packs against another edge-wall.

It’s very well thought out, and gains a lot of respect from the simplicity and flexibility of the design: this is no useless uni-tasker. The One-Hand Kitchen Equipment set is currently available in pixel-form only, existing as a concept design. It looks useful enough for a two-handed user as well, so we hope that it finds its way into a kitchen, soon.

Product page [Yanko Thanks, Radhika!]